Tag Archives: protest

Hundreds protest in Tbilisi against job cuts by Georgia’s defence ministry

TBILISI, JAN. 30 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Since December, Georgia’s defence ministry has laid off several hundred civil servants and soldiers, a round of redundancies aimed at modernising the army and reducing costs.

The lay-offs have triggered protests including one on Jan. 30 when a few hundred people marched in Tbilisi.

Protesters said 1,750 civil servants and 340 soldiers have lost their jobs without any compensation. Another 209 officers quit their jobs voluntarily.

Elguja Urushadze, a former Lieutenant Colonel who used to teach at the military academy, told the Bulletin that he was fired without any notice.

“I served in the Georgian National Army since the very first days of its existence,” he said. “I have been teaching protection from weapons of mass destruction since 1991. I was on a work trip on the 12th of January when they called me and told me I was removed from office. On the papers, my last working day was the 11th of January.”

Georgia wants to join NATO and has supported its mission in Afghanistan. It also has a detachment of soldiers supporting an EU mission in the Central African Republic.

It said that as well as cutting costs, the so-called “Optimisation” process was needed to bring the Georgian army into line with its NATO allies.

“In 2016, 67% of the 670m lari ($250m) budget funds were calculated for salaries and social expenses and only 33% was spent on the military technique, ammunition and on other needs,” the defence ministry said. “NATO standards say that payroll and administrative expenses should make up 50-53% of budget funds.”

It also said that the reforms will save 32m lari, 5% of the total budget.

The protesters, though, said they will continue until they are properly compensated for their job losses.

David Nemsadze, a retired army officer and now a human rights worker specialising in military affairs said: “During the layoffs process, the working code was violated. The selection process was not transparent at all.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)

Kazakh authorities are intimidating protesters

ALMATY, FEB 2, 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in western Kazakhstan are trying to intimidate workers into giving up their hunger strikes, the Eurasianet website reported.

The Eurasianet report quoted workers as saying that a breakdown in trust with the authorities was pushing them towards a potentially violent confrontation.

“We cannot allow another Zhanaozen,” Eurasianet quoted a lawyer for a detained union leader as saying. Zhanaozen is the town in western Kazakhstan where police and strikers clashed in 2011. At least 15 people died.

Several hundred oil workers have been refusing to eat in west Kazakhstan in protest over the closure of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions, an umbrella organization, by a court in Shymkent at the beginning of the year. The hunger strikers’ de facto leaders, Amin Yeleusinov, and Nurbek Kushakbaev were arrested on Jan. 20

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)

Hunger strike over union closure grows at oil fields in west Kazakhstan

ALMATY, JAN. 18 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — At least 400 oil workers in western Kazakhstan have started a hunger strike against the forced closure of the country’s trade union umbrella body, media reported.

The hunger strikers are, mainly, workers at the Kalamkas and Zhetybai oil fields in Mangistau region owned by the state-run Mangistau- munaigas. This is near to Zhanaozen where, in 2011, police shot dead at least 15 striking oil workers.

The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website reported that demonstrators were demanding that the government overturns a decision by a court in Shymkent to disband the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Kazakhstan because it hadn’t been

properly registered at its inception. This is the largest workers’ union in the country and analysts suspected that the Kazakh authorities were increasingly wary and worried about the power that it had accumulated.

Since 2011, the authorities in Kazakhstan have generally bent to accommodate the unions, preferring to dodge confrontation.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Kazakh court sends to jail land protest organisers

ALMATY, NOV. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in western Kazakhstan sentenced the organisers of a land protest earlier this year to five years in prison, triggering outrage from their supporters and human rights workers.

The two men, Max Bokayev and Talgat Ayan, were convicted of inciting social unrest, spreading false information and creating public disorder. They pleaded not guilty and have said that they were just exercising their right to protest against land reforms which the government planned to introduce.

Reports from the courtroom said that supporters of the two men sung the national anthem and shouted “Freedom!” when they were driven away in a police van.

Mihra Rittmann, Europe and Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the two men had been jailed for political reasons.

“Jailing Bokayev and Ayan for nothing more than peacefully expressing dissenting views is an outrageous miscarriage of justice,” she said. “Max Bokayev and Talgat Ayan should be freed immediately.”

For the authorities, the jail sentences marked the final clampdown on a unprecedented period of unrest.

It started in April in Atyrau with a local protest organised by Bokayev and Ayan against the government’s reforms which focused on making it easier for foreigners to buy and own land in Kazakhstan.

The protests, though, gathered pace and within a fortnight had spread to major urban centres across the country, worrying Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. In some cities, protesters fought with riot police. They only stopped when he intervened, repealed the proposed reforms and sacked a handful of government officials.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 307, published on Dec. 2 2016)

People demonstrate in Azerbaijan over house demolitions

BAKU, NOV. 15 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — Dozens of people in a suburb of Baku held a rare protest against the authorities over the demolition of 64 houses.

The authorities said that the houses needed to be cleared to build a new station for the city’s metro system extension. The protesters said, though, the compensation that they had been offered was derisory.

Nesibe Musayeva, one of the demonstrators, also said the authorities were deliberately underscoring the size of people’s properties.

“We can buy neither land nor houses with this money. Where can we go in such cold winter?” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “Where can we go with such an amount of money? We don’t want money. We want just a place to live.”

In the run up to both the 2015 European Games and the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, human rights groups accused Azerbaijan of abuse by beating residents who protested against house demolitions in the suburbs.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Uzbeks complain about price rises but steer clear of protests

TASHKENT, NOV. 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Anatoliy, 60, earns a living by ferrying children to school each day across Uzbekistan’s Soviet- built capital and then hawking for fares in his battered Daewoo Matiz, along the city’s wide boulevards.

“I used to spend 80,000 sum (around $25.7) per week to buy fuel for my car and now I spend 120,000 sum ($38.6),” he said with a resigned air.

On the issue of protesting against the price rises, he shrugged and said that people in Uzbekistan were different from people in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. “People here are ready to say ‘hop mailly’ [“let it be” in Uzbek] to whatever decision is taken by officials,” he said.

Uzbekistan is considered by most human rights organisations to be one of the most repressive countries in the world and anti-government demonstrations are virtually unheard of.

Officials have said that the price rises were needed to balance the price of petrol sold in the regions and in Tashkent. Many people, though, are skeptical and have said that the government is exporting too much petrol for its own profit.

Shokhrukh, 40, another Tashkent-based gypsy cab driver sucked in a deep breath when he was asked about the petrol price rises.

“Our oil reserves in the Bukhara deposit are now insufficient to cover domestic petrol demands and the government has to import petrol from Russia which they have to pay for in roubles and US dollars,” he said.

Like other Central Asian currencies, the Uzbek sum has lost value over the past couple of years, pushing up inflation.

But is it not only drivers who will be impacted by the rise in the cost of petrol. Shukhrat, 40, an ethnic Uyghur in Tashkent, who sells cloth at Tashkent local bazaar said that all prices will have to increase off the back of such a big jump in the price of petrol.

“Food requires transportation and consequently fuel, I expect some shop owners will rise their food prices,” he said.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Comment: Support rises for Armenia daredevil protesters, says Demytrie

OCT. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — When Armenian gunmen calling themselves the Daredevils of Sassoun after a group of lionised 8th century freedom fighters seized a police compound in Yerevan in July, the world’s attention was focused on another story unfolding next door – an attempted coup in Turkey.

Yet what took place in Armenia was an unprecedented strike against the state. Veterans from a war in the 1990s between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the so-called Daredevils held police officers and medics hostage for two weeks before surrendering to the authorities without a fight.

But, by then, thousands of Armenians had come out onto the streets to express their solidarity with the gunmen.

In the eyes of the authorities the gunmen were criminals, official media described them as terrorists. Three policemen died during the siege, afterall. But on the day of their surrender, supporters gathered outside the Opera House in central Yerevan chanting their names and calling them heroes.

One long-term South-Caucasus observer told me that what happened in July was the emergence of a new and radical form of anti-government protest, likely to be repeated in other post-Soviet oligarchies.

There was no single reason for the gunmen’s actions, instead they were driven by an aggregate of problems facing Armenian society.

Poverty, corruption, inequality, and the authorities’ inability to resolve the ongoing conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh Their actions prompted mixed feelings among Armenians. Some were outraged that the gunmen were using violence to achieve their goals. Others saw this aggressive action as necessary but poorly executed.

But many were inspired. Since their arrest, Daredevil supporters have been mythologising them, writing songs about their sacrifice for a noble cause – a more prosperous and free Armenia.

Since the siege and the protests, President Serzh Sargsyan has promised reforms, and a new PM and government has been ushered in. Few, though, believe deeply rooted social and economic problems can be solved so easily.

And the story of the Daredevils is not over. Once a trial date is set, their support base will become active again, demanding their release. That raises the prospect of another spell of street protests in Armenia.

By Rahyan Demytrie, a BBC correspondent in the South Caucasus

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Kazakh government defuses worker unrest

ALMATY, OCT. 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Betraying its nervousness over labour disputes, the Kazakh government stepped in to end a strike by 2,000 workers at an oil company near Zhanaozen in the west of the country.

To end the strike, the government promised the company employing the workers a major contract boost which will allow it to increase salaries — meeting the strikers’ demands.

The strike over pay had been building, sporadically, for weeks but had only been supported by a few dozen people, some of them on hunger strikes. It was only on Sept. 30, when 2,000 strikers rallied for the first time demanding higher salaries from Burgylau, a local subcontractor for the state-owned Ozenmunaigas, that the government sent senior offi- cials to defuse what to them had become an intolerable scenario.

Zhanaozen, a scruffy town built in Soviet times to house labourers working on nearby oil fields, is seared into the Kazakh national conscience.

In 2011 clashes between protesters and police killed at least 15 people and plunged the government into perhaps its most serious post-Soviet crisis. Hundreds of riot police poured into the region and emergency powers were imposed. Eventually, the government was forced to guarantee jobs and wages in the region.

Importantly the clashes in Zhanaozen in 2011 have defined Kazakh labour disputes. Since then big business and the government have shown an unwillingness to face down worker demands.

And so it proved again. A Burgylau executive had told workers that the company was unable to pay workers any more because it wasn’t making a profit. This changed, though, after a visit from Alik Aidarbayev, governor of the western Mangistau region, who offered Burgylau another $18m worth of contracts in exchange for meeting the workers’ demands.

Burgylau is a subsidiary of KazPet- roDrilling.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 299, published on Oct. 7 2016)

Kazakh authorities refuse protest

SEPT. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Atyrau city government denied a petition by Mothers in White Headscarves, a women’s protest group in Kazakhstan, which sought to hold a rally on Sept. 17. Public protests against worsening economic conditions in Kazakhstan have been becoming more frequent in Kazakhstan. Around 1,000 Atyrau citizens demonstrated against a proposed land reform in April, the largest protest in Kazakhstan for the past few years.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 297, published on Sept. 23 2016)

Azerbaijan’s opposition protests

SEPT. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s opposition coalition, the National Council of Democratic Forces held a rally in Baku, protesting against the upcoming constitutional referendum. The coalition said the rally would be the first of a series of demonstrations against the government’s plans to change the Constitution. Wrapped in flags and chanting against corruption, thousands took part in the rally. The organisers said over 10,000 participated. Official figures said only 2,500 were at the rally. Importantly, the rally had been authorised by local officials.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 296, published on Sept. 16 2016)